“Did they ever find her?”
“Yeah, a couple years later. She was all messed up from some brain disorder. A fugue, they said. A kind of amnesia. Creeped me out.”
“Who was the other missing person?”
“Hmm?”
“The other missing person. You said there were two others, besides your father.”
“Oh.” Max wiped hot sauce from the corners of his lips. “The other one was me.”
Ritter blinked.
“I was missing for about a week when I was seven. It was in April 1971, up north—I don’t know if you heard about the storm that hit Northern California—”
“Yes, I did, my sister was living up in San Francisco when it hit. Like a monsoon, she said.”
“Yeah, it was pretty scary. I think Twilight Falls got the worst of it, but my mom and I were living in Arondale at the time, about fifty miles northeast of there. Storm was still bad, though.” Max chewed on the empty hot sauce packet, his expression dazed. “We were waiting out the weather. All power was off, and I...um....” He scratched his head. Something didn’t want to come out. “I ended up getting really scared and just running away.”
“Into the storm?”
“Yeah, don’t ask me. Seven-year-old logic. Maybe I just wanted to face my fear and show myself that it wasn’t as bad as it all seemed.”
“You could’ve been killed, though.”
“I know. Believe me, I know. But I wasn’t. Somehow I ended up in one of the parks on the outskirts of town. I can’t even remember all of what happened. But apparently whatever prompted me to do such a crazy stupid thing is what saved me. The roof of my house caved in.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah. My mother was killed. That’s why, when they found me, I was sent to an orphanage in San Francisco, until I got a scholarship to go to school down here.”
“And you’ve been here ever since?”
Max nodded.
“How do you choose your...faces? For your artwork? Now that I think back on some of your pieces, I notice you use younger folks more, like your age, or children. Of course, at the time I had no idea they were portraits of real people, but I also suppose that could be why your stuff is so sort of haunting.”
Max took this in thoughtfully. “I stay away from using the faces that make it on TV. If they’re on the news and the entire nation knows about them, then the effect is watered down. I don’t even have a TV, actually.”
“So you use photos from the newspaper?”
“Many newspapers. I subscribe to ten different newspapers, six from major cities, four from smaller towns. I also come across flyers on telephone poles or streetlights, or bulletin boards. Milk cartons, too. You can find them everywhere, actually. The missing.”
“Ironic statement.”
Max shrugged.
“You went to school here, right? In Los Angeles?”
“Mm-hmm, Rheta College.”
“Would you cite any particular influence in your style? A mentor, maybe? A teacher? Or an artist of yesteryear? I notice your pieces are very much an amalgamation of various styles and influences. Dali, for instance.”
Max smacked his lips. “A lot of has inspired me—Dali’s a given, and many more. But there’s something grander for me. My mother used to say that God was the greatest artist. I don’t know about greatest, but He’s the best one we know. The most prolific. Life inspires life. I’m not just slathering wood or canvas with oil and acrylic, I’m bringing out something in the viewer, a new life, an outgrowth of them.” Max paused, threw the hot sauce packet to the floor, bit open another. “Hard to explain, but that’s the hope.”
Max lost himself in the wall, then turned toward an unfinished painting of two children traversing a giant spinal cord drawing away toward a setting sun, their hands linked.
“Basically, when someone looks at one of my pieces,” Max said, “I like to think that they’re starting from a fresh slate, as if they’re wiped clean mentally. Everything has been washed away. They’re submerged in my world, and, one by one, my world will summon back to life the fears, the joys, the loves, everything that we, as a species, came to know and understand. So they can experience it all over. A self-re-creation.”
“I see.”
“I can give you some salt,” Max said. “To take with my words.”
“Oh, no, believe me, this is great,” Ritter said, jotting more in his notepad. “I’m fascinated by it. I’ve always been fascinated by your work.”
“All right, but the salt offer still stands. I can see in your face you think I’m insane. Of course, with your job, you probably think all artists are insane.”
Ritter chuckled. “It’s an insanity we need more of.”
***
II
The hot sauce packets weren’t doing it. Not tonight. Tonight he needed the smoke in his chest, the gentle ashen stroke of the cigarette against his tongue. Toxic chemo to drive out this cancerous anxiety. Who knew what exactly was in those hot sauce packets anyway—Max had started to feel they were responsible for his recent indigestion.
At the Taco Shack, he had filled up on Mild packets, which were piled free for the taking at the condiments station. He’d been in and out. Behind the counter, the pockmarked kid had thrown him a wary eye. Perhaps getting wise. Whatever.
Past midnight and Venice Boulevard lay empty. Streetlights sputtered against the dark, pittances of light against buildings long shadowed, save for one: The Sirens Shop at Venice and Beethoven, aglow in its purple-green squiggles of erotic neon, where for two years now he’d worked the graveyard shift.
Something stirred at the base of a palm tree. Max jumped, unaware the pile was a live thing. A homeless person, cocooned heavily in sheets and a blue sleeping bag. A groan. As Max passed, he could see the man’s wiry hair jutting from the blankets. He walked faster.
He stuck a packet in his mouth, bit it open with one chomp. The spices began their tingling celebration on his tongue. He didn’t mind the dark and solitary nature of his work
